Collections and catalogues

The Law Library collection provides extensive material for research, teaching and learning. The aim is to cover primary and secondary material for a wide range of jurisdictions, concentrating on the United Kingdom, the Commonwealth, the United States, individual European countries, and the European Union. In addition there are extensive holdings in legal history, jurisprudence, public and private international law, Roman law and criminology. In general the library only collects material in Roman and Cyrillic scripts and does not collect material from the Middle East, the Far East or Latin America, except for introductory works in English. The collection has particular historical depth in UK & Irish material as a result of receiving books through the Legal Deposit scheme. There are a number of online guides to the Law Library's resources for both jurisdictions and subject areas.

As a reference collection, books cannot be borrowed, but the majority of books are housed on open shelves, and are easily browsed. Items in heavy demand are housed at the Reserve Desk and may be borrowed within the library.

There are several special collections in the library, including the Viner collection.

Virtually the entire collection is catalogued on SOLO, the library catalogue covering the majority of the Library collections of the University of Oxford including the Bodleian Libraries, most College and other libraries affiliated to the University, and the book collections are complimented by a wide range of legal databases.

Many official publications are held at the Law Library.  Since October 2010 the Bodleian's Official Papers collection is held on the ground floor of the Law Library. (Formerly it was in the Radcliffe Camera). Further details are available from their website.

The Law Library also hosts the European Documentation Centre.

Faculty publications

Lists of recent publications written by the members of the University of Oxford Law Faculty can be consulted via the Faculty's web pages.